Membership in the EU and NATO was supposed to have promoted Eastern Europe from their inferior status in the global pecking order. Ex-members of the Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics had eagerly refashioned themselves as exponents of Donald Rumsfeld’s new Europe. They now found their prospects for growth shattered and their governments thrown back to where their post-Communist careers had begun, as lesser sovereigns, and more or less resentful supplicants for international financial assistance.
